Madison-Rafah Journal

Posted by guevaragz on YouTube, January 01, 2007

This clip is taken from the film The Frontiers Of Dreams and Fears by Mai Masri. It's about refugees in Lebanon meeting with their families and relatives from occupied Palestine after the liberation of the South in Lebanon. They are meeting at the border where the fences are created by the Israelis between Lebanon and Palestine.

I can't talk about why and what this movie is about. You see for yourself and judge how shattered the families are, and how it feels to see someone you love on the other side and you can't even hug them, while you know that none of you had done anything to deserve such a treatment except that you're Palestinian.

Sorry for the delay between audio and video, but it's the only version I have.

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Agence France-Presse, June 18, 2007

Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas swore in a new cabinet on Sunday and outlawed Islamist Hamas fighters after their violent seizure of Gaza, as Israel came under rocket fire from Lebanon in a new front to the crisis.

Adding to the tensions, Israeli troops moved into the north of the Gaza Strip — now an Islamist enclave on the Jewish state's doorstep.

Israeli Deputy Defence Minister Ephraim Sneh said the army incursion into Gaza was a "preventive" action, in effect creating a buffer zone on Palestinian territory as masked Hamas gunmen consolidated their power there.

Hamas fighters overran forces loyal to Abbas's secular Fatah movement in Gaza on Friday after a week of bitter internecine fighting which brought the Palestinians to the brink of all-out civil war and killed more than 110 people.

After swearing in the 12-member emergency cabinet headed by new prime minister Salam Fayyad at a ceremony in the West Bank town of Ramallah, Abbas swiftly took aim at Hamas, branded a terrorist outfit by Israel and the West.

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I know it must seem like we're writing to you with one crisis after another. Sadly, that's how things are in Palestine, Iraq and now, Lebanon. Right now, as Palestinian refugees are being killed and driven from one Palestinian refugee camp to another, we wanted to give you some information about the situation and let you know what you can do to help. Attached are a few articles we thought would be helpful.

This afternoon we spoke with Marcy Newman, a friend who has been teaching at the American University of Beirut (AUB). She had just visited Shatila, Bourj al Barajneh, and Beddawi refugee camps and described the nightmare she witnessed and heard about. She was calling to see if MECA could send help for the thousands of terrified people who have fled to these camps and are barely receiving any aid. You can read Marcy's account on Electronic Lebanon.

If you are able to, please make a contribution of any amount. MECA will be sending funds for the most basic necessities for people who have fled in terror, without their belongings, and are now living in small homes with more than twenty extra people.

Thank you!
From all of us at MECA

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Stephen Zunes, Foreign Policy In Focus, May 15, 2007

Israelis from across the political spectrum, emboldened by the interim report from the government’s Winograd Commission, which investigated Israel’s ill-fated assault on Lebanon, are expressing regrets over last summer’s conflict with their northern neighbor. Uproar over the way a relatively minor border incident managed to escalate into a full-scale war is leading to demands for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s resignation and other top government officials are under pressure or stepping down.

Meanwhile, in the United States Congress, leaders of both parties are not only still defending Israel’s decision to go to war, but its conduct of the war as well.

During the five weeks of fighting, 119 Israeli soldiers and 43 Israeli civilians were killed. It was the Lebanese who suffered the most, however. Massive Israeli bombardments took the lives of more than 1,100 people, the vast majority of whom were innocent civilians, and caused more than $3.5 billion in damage to the country’s civilian infrastructure and widespread environmental damage.

Moral and Legal Responsibility

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David Shearer and Francine Pickup, UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Humanitarian Exchange Magazine 37, March 2007

With the spotlight focused on the political causes and after-effects of the Hizbollah–Israel war and the upsurge in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in 2006, little attention has been paid to the role played by donor assistance to the region. Aid in the Middle East has been motivated by donors’ political preferences, not humanitarian needs. That intensified markedly during 2006, a shift that also challenges the activities and agendas of aid agencies. This article examines the interconnections between aid and politics, and how they have played themselves out in Lebanon and the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt).

There are some obvious parallels between the Israeli–Palestinian and the Israeli–Hizbollah conflicts. In both instances, Israel, with superior firepower, was responding to the abduction of its soldiers by militants within its territory. In both instances, Israel was fighting militants whose organisations had also been democratically elected to their respective governments. Hizbollah draws the bulk of its support from the Shia population, while Hamas enjoys a broader spectrum of support from Palestinians. Both are political–military organisations, both are Islamic in orientation and both operate extensive welfare networks. Both also share similar origins. Hizbollah grew out of resistance to Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon in the 1980s and 1990s, and Hamas drew on Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory to increase its influence during the 1990s.

For Western governments, the growing dominance of Hizbollah and Hamas has been deeply problematic. The US and the European Union (EU) passed legislation in 1993 and 2003, respectively, declaring Hamas a terrorist organisation and severely limiting contacts with it. Hizbollah is classed as a terrorist group in the US, but the approach in Europe is more ambivalent. The prevailing policy towards Lebanon by Western and some Arab states has been to counter Hizbollah’s increasing influence and strengthen Prime Minister Faoud Siniora’s government. In the oPt, the strategy has been to isolate Hamas and actively promote its rivals. A key policy tool in both cases has been aid.

Lebanon

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Sarah Mahdi, independent consultant, Humanitarian Exchange Magazine 37, March 2007

The violence that broke out in Israel, Lebanon and the occupied Palestinian territories in July 2006 was unexpected and, in the case of the Israeli bombardment and invasion of Lebanon, brief, lasting only 34 days. At the height of the conflict, over 900,000 Lebanese were displaced from southern Lebanon, and 1,191 Lebanese and 158 Israelis were killed. Reconstruction estimates run into billions of dollars, and the threat of sectarian violence and insecurity persists in the region. Since the Israeli government and civil society had the capacity to respond to Israel’s limited needs, the wider international scale-up of aid actors focused on Lebanon and Gaza.

The humanitarian response in Lebanon

A large-scale international aid operation was launched in response to the war in Lebanon, including the government, the UN, NGOs and local civil and political groups. The operational response in Lebanon was at first hindered by difficulties in accessing areas of the conflict due to the Israeli blockade of Lebanon and Israeli restrictions on movement south of the Litani river. There were also constraints in coordinating and negotiating with local political groups affiliated with armed forces. Difficulties in accessing the south during the bombing and blockade of Lebanese ports and airspace prompted warnings of critical fuel and food shortages, and left much of the affected population cut off from urgently needed services, including medical care.

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One of Shapira's last flights in the Air Force in September 2003.

Robert Hirschfield, In These Times, April 6, 2007

In September 2003, in the midst of Israel’s campaign of targeted assassinations against Palestinian terrorists, a 31-year-old Black Hawk helicopter pilot named Yonatan Shapira terrorized Israel’s military high command without committing a single act of violence.

In the Pilots’ Letter of Refusal that he authored and 26 other pilots signed, these historic words were written: “We, who were raised to love the state of Israel and contribute to the Zionist enterprise, refuse to take part in Air Force attacks on civilian population centers. … These actions are illegal and immoral, and are a direct result of the ongoing occupation which is corrupting all of Israeli society.” Reading those words to an audience of progressive Jews, he added, “We will continue to serve the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), but not the Israeli occupation forces.”

It wasn’t the first time Israeli soldiers refused to serve—dissident soldiers forged a movement called Yesh Gvul (There Is A Limit) during the first Lebanese war in the early ’80s. Shapira’s letter, however, did mark the first time that pilots, the elite of the military and the darlings of society, defied military orders for reasons of conscience. They were promptly dismissed from the Air Force.

Shapira, the son of an Israeli pilot from an Ashkenazi family, is currently living with his girlfriend in Brooklyn and finishing his thesis for the European Center For Peace and Conflict Studies in Austria. His subjects are the Israeli pilots with whom he conducted countless hours of interviews.

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